“The only goal for you at GeekOut is to meet 2 new people and come up with 2 new ideas”
-Jevgeni “JK” Kabanov, ZeroTurnaround CEO and Founder.

The WiFi was amazing–nuff said

As I sit here at the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, hotspotting an EDGE signal from my iPhone to my computer (Velocity organizers want $80.00/day per device for WiFi), it reminds me that GeekOut 2013 had amazingly strong WiFi, enough to serve the 350 geeks (and 1000 devices) that attended. But what do you expect from a country with WiFi on the public busses?

This is the third GeekOut that ZeroTurnaround ran–last year, 250 Java fans came and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. For 2013, we upped the ante by trying out a new paradigm for IT conferences…instead of focusing on the budgets, sales and sponsor packages, we decided it was time to revolutionize the way the industry thinks of technology events.

How did we do that? Well, like our excellent list of handpicked speakers, we also carefully selected vendors and invited only the firms with the best technologies out there. From Atlassian, JetBrains and Github to Vaadin, Hazelcast and Plumbr, all technology vendors were required to give in-depth tech demos and thus were invited to take part in the show like anyone else. Not treated like a source of funds (GeekOut, by the way, did not earn money).

The former Indian leg-wrestling champion of his home town, Oliver joined the ZeroTurnaround team in 2010 as the tiny startup's first marketing employee. While not a developer himself, he is inexplicably talented at finding code errors that somehow appear in RebelLabs articles. Oliver likes reading, writing and 'rithmatic, as well as music, films, dogs, steaks, gazing at world maps and strolling through the deeply-forested parks of the Czech Republic, where he lives. Say hi on Twitter @theotown